Saturday, September 18, 2004

Published

Well, The Seattle Times published my comments online and in print that I made earlier about the proposed amendment to the Constitution that would allow the Schwarzengroper or Jennifer Granholm (both foreign-born naturalized citizens in the U.S.) to run for President. I submitted the pithy comments after posting them on the blog. The Times did some minor editing (leaving out the Schwarzeneger and Granholm references), but left it mostly intact.

Just for clarification purposes, I'm all for discussing this concept (no topic is beyond discussion to my mind), but I'm not all for doing this just to see a "rising star" in the party get to run for office. Surely, the deliberation this deserves shouldn't occur during an election year. Changing the Constitution should not be done lightly and the political climate being what it is, we should hold off on any changes until things cool down.

My comments about outsourcing were meant in jest, in part. Members of both parties are abdicating responsibility for their actions when creating legislation for this country. Democrats and Republicans have been complicit in creating extrodinary tax incentives for the wealthy and the corporate to outsource jobs - most of which do not get reported or are little understood by the people these legislators serve, assuming they are understood by the legislators themselves (see NY Times reporter, David Cay Johnston's book on this or read an interview online with him about this topic). They are also complicit in not reforming the health care system in this country towit the latest proposals to buy drugs from Canada and Europe merely shift the burden of creating reform at home to buying drugs from nations that have already enacted reform, including price controls for said drugs.

I'm no parochialist. There may be candidates that are foreign born, but are raised or spent a great deal of time in the US that deserve to be president. However, surely we can find people of equal or greater quality who has been born on our shores. For politicians to claim that it's not possible, then they are once again admitting complicity in not wanting to deal with the issues of true electoral reform at home that would attract such candidates and abdicating their role as legislators.